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Step aside World Cup heroes, there’s a bigger global competition in town. The whistle has been blown to launch the third Invertebrate of the Year contest.

We want you to nominate your favourite spineless creature for the hugely popular annual Guardian jamboree which celebrates the wonder and importance of the world’s invertebrates.

Are you enraptured by earthworms? Do you have a crush on cephalopods? Are you barmy about beetles? Blown away by butterflies? Mad for moths?

If you’re not, don’t worry: there are at least 1.3 million invertebrate species to choose from.

How about the wētāpunga, a giant flightless, jumpless grasshopper? Or the water-walking fen raft spider? Or the tongue-biting louse, a tiny crustacean that burrows into a fish’s gills and clings to its tongue, eating what the fish eats and sharing enough so the fish stays alive – for years?

We, creatures with spines, are a tiny minority in the animal world. Humans, dogs, cows, birds, fish – we may think we’re the planetary rulers but we’re not. We make up barely 5% of animal life on Earth.

Without the unseen labours of our unheralded neighbours – the snails, spiders, sponges, corals, bivalves, wasps and crabs – the grandiose edifice that is human civilisation would crumble.

These guys are our pollinators, soil-makers, fertility-bringers, water-cleaners, predator and plague-controllers. A few invertebrates may still wreak havoc in the human world but as the legendary biologist E. O. Wilson put it: “The truth is that we need invertebrates but they don’t need us.”

So who will you nominate?

There are just two rules. One is that our noble previous winners cannot be put to the popular vote again.

Last year’s Invertebrate of the Year was a triumph for Milnesium tardigradum, a microscopic multisegmented animal that resembles a piglet wrapped in an enormous duvet.

In 2024, the first ever winner of the Invertebrate of the Year contest was the common earthworm, which won a landslide 38% of the popular vote.

The second rule is that while you may consider some of our leading politicians to be a spineless weirdo, please resist the temptation to nominate them.

Thankfully, no humans have the superpowers of the all-female common rotifer, who can survive being frozen for thousands of years, or the dark-edged bee fly, a twerking trickster whose babies devour the offspring of solitary bees.

So let’s set aside anthropocentric thinking and nominate a new leader. Surely our world would be better run by an emperor dragonfly or a monarch butterfly? Would we even take the horrid king assassin bug over our current ship of (human) fools?

We can make it happen.

Nominate your Invertebrate of the Year now! You have until midnight on Monday 13 July to submit your response.

On August 3 we will begin to unveil the shortlist of ten wonderful creatures; then everyonewill have the opportunity to vote, campaign, lobby and persuade their friends to back their favourite.

After scrupulous and careful counting by the worker bees of the Guardian, the Invertebrate of the Year 2026 will be revealed on August 17.